“Hold, madam,” said he, startling her ear with the cold austerity of his tone. “I cannot heed your questions,—I am filled with the question I must put to yourself. You opposed my boyish love for Leonora Avenel. I do not blame you,—all mothers of equal rank would have done the same. Yet, had you not frustrated all frank intercourse with her, I might have taken refusal from her own lips,—survived that grief, and now been a happy man. Years since then have rolled away,—rolled over her quiet slumbers, and my restless waking life. All this time were you aware that Audley Egerton had been the lover of Leonora Avenel?”
“Harley, Harley! do not speak to me in that cruel voice, do not look at me with those hard eyes!”
“You knew it, then,—you, my mother!” continued Harley, unmoved by her rebuke; “and why did you never say, ‘Son, you are wasting the bloom and uses of your life in sorrowful fidelity to a lie! You are lavishing trust and friendship on a perfidious hypocrite.’”
“How could I speak to you thus; how could I dare to do so, seeing you still so cherished the memory of that unhappy girl, still believed that she had returned your affection? Had I said to you what I knew (but not till after her death), as to her relations with Audley Egerton—”
“Well? You falter; go on; had you done so?”
“Would you have felt no desire for revenge? Might there not have been strife between you, danger, bloodshed? Harley, Harley! Is not such silence pardonable in a mother? And why deprive you too of the only friend you seemed to prize; who alone had some influence over you; who concurred with me in the prayer and hope, that some day you would find a living partner worthy to replace this lost delusion, arouse your faculties,—be the ornament your youth promised to your country? For you wrong Audley,—indeed you do!”
“Wrong him! Ah, let me not do that. Proceed.”
“I do not excuse him his rivalship, nor his first concealment of it. But believe me, since then, his genuine remorse, his anxious tenderness for your welfare, his dread of losing your friendship—”
“Stop! It was doubtless Audley Egerton who induced you yourself to conceal what you call his ‘relations’ with her whom I can now so calmly name,—Leonora Avenel?”
“It was so, in truth; and from motives that—”